Politics|‘Petty Nonsense’ of Washington: Tillerson Joins in Thrashing the Capital

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‘Petty Nonsense’ of Washington: Tillerson Joins in Thrashing the Capital

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Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson on Wednesday. When asked if he had called the president a “moron,” he bristled: “This is what I don’t understand about Washington.”CreditCreditWin McNamee/Getty Images

“I’m not going to deal with petty stuff like that,” Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson told reporters on Wednesday, declining to refute an NBC report that he had privately called President Trump a “moron” this year. “This is what I don’t understand about Washington. Again, I’m not from this place. But the places I come from, we don’t deal with that kind of petty nonsense.”

There was no immediate estimate available for the collective pettiness of Texas, where Mr. Tillerson was raised, nor of the oil industry, where he spent his career until Mr. Trump summoned him to the pettiness hub along the Potomac.

But for a certain class of Washington denizen, Mr. Tillerson’s slight opened a new front in the nation’s forever-war against the reputation of its capital. The thrashing of Washington culture by voters, nonvoters, members of Congress — that much is a sacred rite.

A sitting secretary of state, at odds with his president and blaming the city’s trifling instincts for stoking tensions, is another matter.

“It’s profoundly paradoxical,” said Rick Tyler, a longtime Republican strategist who served as communications director for Senator Ted Cruz of Texas during last year’s Republican presidential primary race. “His boss is the most petty person ever to come to Washington.”

Barney Frank, the retired longtime Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, marveled at how wholly a sitting government in Washington had embraced a view of Washington villainy.

“You expect this from Congress,” not the executive, he said, noting that such open policy fissures within a White House were also something new. “It used to be considered wrong for the opposition party to differ with the president sharply on foreign policy. Now it’s not the opposition party that’s differing from the president on foreign policy, it’s the secretary of state.”

In his remarks, Mr. Tillerson was vigilant in treating certain non-“moron” details with due care. He explicitly denied, for instance, that he has ever considered resigning his post, as NBC reported, much less that Vice President Mike Pence had been compelled to persuade him to stay.

“One team with one mission,” he said of the Trump executive branch.

But few would contest that the relationship between a president and his top employees is a subject of nontrivial global significance. So too, for that matter, is the question of whether the president is a moron. (A State Department spokeswoman, Heather Nauert, later insisted that Mr. Tillerson had not used that language.)

The noun at issue on Wednesday is also no novelty in the Trump administration. Gary D. Cohn, the president’s top economic adviser, joked to a group of Senate Democrats this year that “only morons pay the estate tax,” according to people present at the meeting.

And Mr. Trump himself has let fly the m-word with considerable frequency. His Twitter account has referenced “moron” or some variation thereof more than 50 times since 2012, according to an archive of his handiwork.

Some are repurposed comments from little-known users. Some are Trump-branded fusillades at political foes like Karl Rove and George F. Will. Others are Trump-branded fusillades aimed at little-known users.

Four years later, the stakes have been elevated some. Mr. Trump has openly undercut his aides as a matter of course, with deliberations that often play out in public view.

Mr. Tillerson has appeared uniquely vulnerable to such indignities, eclipsed at times by Nikki R. Haley, the ambassador to the United Nations, and even by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who was tasked with forging a peace deal in the Middle East. Mr. Tillerson’s policy aims have also been contradicted repeatedly by Mr. Trump.

Mr. Tyler appraised Mr. Tillerson as “the most abused cabinet member that Trump has,” adding that the competition was considerable.

But Mr. Tillerson has exacted a measure of retribution against Mr. Trump, intentionally or not, during his tenure, distancing himself from the president’s equivocal statements about white supremacists after violent demonstrations in August in Charlottesville, Va. “The president speaks for himself,” Mr. Tillerson said then, declining to affirm that Mr. Trump’s words represented “American values.”

By the end of Wednesday, whether or not Mr. Tillerson tacitly admitted to calling Mr. Trump a moron, there was at least bipartisan consensus on this much: The stability of a relationship between the president and his secretary of state probably matters.

“It’s not helpful to the country to have this kind of thing going on,” said Thomas M. Davis III, a former Republican congressman from Virginia, who noted that while “there’s pettiness everywhere, in Washington, it’s a blood sport.”

“The secretary of state calling the president he or she works for a moron is not a petty point,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. “It’s big news.”

Of course, they would say that. They have worked in Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Attack on Culture of Capital From Inside One of Its Highest Offices. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe